A website subdomain going live may have indicated remakes of Pokemon Diamond and Pokemon Pearl are in the works, and could be announced soon.
The claim comes via Centro Pokemon and Centro Pokemon Leaks [1, 2, 3]. The latter has been infamous for using their sources to reveal upcoming secrets of Pokemon games. Their most accurate come from data-mining mainline Pokemon games shortly before their release, as a well as beta and in-development files.
The group has been hit by DMCA claims before, though they have also drawn attention to “leaks” of unreleased Pokemon games that later proved to be false. Nonetheless, Centro Pokemon Leaks’ source is another Pokemon-information gathering Twitter account; PokeXperto.
They claim two subdomains to the Pokemon website went live on January 12th, but were taken down soon after the news spread. These were diamondpearl.pokemon.com, and legends.pokemon.com. Even when the websites were live, they only showed a 403 error.
The former would match the formatting of the subdomain for the Pokemon Sword and Shield games (swordshield.pokemon.com), and as Centro points out, no other subdomain that could apply is active (such as blackwhite.pokemon.com). However, there is an issue with the name.
While a remake of those games is certainly possible due to past remakes, those past remakes had different names. Gold and Silver were remade into Heart Gold and Soul Silver. Ruby and Sapphire became Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. Therefore, the question begs why Diamond and Pearl would retain their name.
It is entirely possible instead of a remake, the games will simply be made available digitally on the eShop. This happened with Red, Blue, Yellow ,Gold, and Silver on the Nintendo 3DS. They came with extra features allowing Pokemon to be transferred to Pokemon Home.
However, as part of the 25th anniversary celebrations for the Pokemon franchise, announcing the remakes at this time would certainly make sense. Though how faithful the game will be to the original, and what elements of the modern Pokemon games will be implemented is completely unknown.
We must also consider Pokemon Platinum, a very well-received game in the series, and the enhanced “third-version” to Diamond and Pearl. Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire saw Emerald‘s Battle Frontier being implemented, but severely cut back compared to the original.
It may not be entirely unfair to say fans are more interested in a remake of Platinum; or for the remakes of Diamond and Pearl to incorporate the story and additional content from Platinum. We will keep you informed as we learn more.
We must also consider the legends subdomain. As Pokemon Unite was announced in the west, we can rule out that being the game’s western name. This may mean a game or other piece of media called “Pokemon Legends” will be announced.
Image: Pokemon
